Within those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I Had Rendered

Among the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary vision remained with me: a tome I had converted from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dust and soot. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A City Amid Assault

Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent blasts. The digital network was entirely cut off. I was in my residence, working on a text about what it means to move words across languages, and the principles and concerns of taking on another’s narrative. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the facility closed. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, filled with lexicons, valuable editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a plant was burning, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: swift terror, anxiety, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and sources that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was broken, the possessions lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dust have the last word.

Converting Pain

A picture was shared on social media of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman dashing between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing ruin into image, demise into lines, mourning into longing.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, support, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, determined refusal to be silenced.